Not true! When Escape Pod was launched in 2005 its goal was to create a reprint market for short science fiction. In those days if you didn’t subscribe to a print magazine, chances were you’d never get another chance to read the stories it contained. PseudoPod and PodCastle followed Escape Pod’s lead, and for many years focused on reprints as a way of introducing their growing audiences to great fiction and the developing podcast distribution method.

But over the last few years EA has shifted towards more original fiction. The Artemis Rising original fiction showcase is a great example. While each show takes their own approach in terms of balancing new and reprint fiction, here’s some numbers from the first quarter of 2017 to give you an idea:

Are there other magazines that have higher per-word rates? Yes – but do they have a combined half a million average monthly listeners? That’s our unique selling point.

There are plenty of other markets that pay lower rates, fixed rates, or not at all. We consider ourselves middle of the pack, and the rights we request in our contracts reflect this. We request only what we use, ask for industry-standard exclusivity periods, and give up front carve-outs for annual ‘best of’ and award anthologies.

Definitely not true! Ratified in 2015 and passed in 2016, the ‘A Story by Any Other Name’ amendment to the World Science Fiction Society’s bylaws makes it clear that a work is eligible in the category appropriate to its length, regardless of publication format (including digital publication and audio):

Section 3.2.6: the categories of Best Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story shall be open to works in which the text is the primary form of communication, regardless of the publication medium, including but not limited to physical print, audiobook, and ebook.

For example:

Escape Pod was the very first Hugo-nominated semiprozine podcast in 2018!

PodCastle is the first podcast nominated for the World Fantasy Special Award – Non-Professional category

Plus, podcast stories have featured in multiple ‘best of’ anthologies and other prestigious awards. For example, Nino Cipri’s Opals and Clay (originally published as PodCastle episode 402) was a 2016 Finalist in the James Tiptree Jr. award.

Marguerite Kenner is the co-owner of EA, along with Alasdair Stuart. She also edits Cast of Wonders.

Marguerite Kenner is a native Californian who has forsaken sunny paradise to live with her partner, Alasdair Stuart, in a UK city named after her favorite pastime but pronounced differently.

She’s an experienced multi-tasker, managing her time between being co-owner of Escape Artists, editing Cast of Wonders, lecturing, being a commercial lawyer, and studying popular culture (i.e. going to movies, playing video games, and curling up with a really good book).

Alasdair is EA’s owner and publisher, but he’s not on any editorial teams.

His job involves helping the shows do awesome things, steering EA towards the future, being involved with the genre fiction community, and hosting both PseudoPod and at Escape Pod. He’s a frequent guest on other podcasts, appears regularly at conventions, and works with many different genre award organizations and associations.

In other words, his roles don’t involve selecting individual stories. Sending him your story won’t have any impact on whether or not it gets published.

Great question! The short version is either: each method has about the same cost to us.

If you prefer an interactive donor experience, and want to receive regular news and behind-the-scenes bonus content, head to Patreon. You’ll get access to a personal RSS feed of non-fiction Zero Episodes by Alasdair Stuart and Karen Bovenmyer.

If you’d rather set up a monthly or annual subscription that will take care of itself, PayPal is your best bet. Pick one of the drop-down options to the right. If none of them are quite right for you, choose the ‘Donate via Credit/Debit’ to go to PayPal and enter your own (just be sure to tick the ‘Make this a monthly donation’ box). Need help, just drop us a line.

If a one-off donation is what you’re after, hit the ‘Donate via Credit/Debit’ button.

Under “Payment method,” click Change next to the funding source you’re looking to change.

If you have a balance with PayPal, then it is always the first payment method we use to pay a Billing Agreement.

If that doesn’t work, check the links to the right to set up a new PayPal subscription at your desired level (and thank you!). Make sure to tick the ‘Make this a monthly donation’ box if you’re not using the drop-down options. Then, log into your PayPal account and cancel the old subscription (we can’t cancel it from our end).

Share our episodes with your friends and family, and on social media. All of our shows are on Twitter and Facebook. Signal boosts are always appreciated, both by us and the fantastic creators involved!

If you use something like podget or mashpodder that is based on wget, this might solve the problems.

Modify the –user-agent parameter for wget to be blank or a specific agent. For example: –user-agent=”” or –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36″

If you use something like podget or mashpodder that is based on wget, this might solve the problems:

Modify the –user-agent parameter for wget to be blank or a specific agent. For example: –user-agent=”” or –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36″

Currently, there’s no easy way to get past episodes in bulk. We don’t have a torrent, and the podcast feeds contain only the most recent 40 or 50 episodes due to the space limitations imposed by syndicators.

But watch this space – we’re working on a way to make our back catalog a whole lot more accessible to our listeners.